Microsoft blames European Commission for global CrowdStrike catastrophe
The worldwide outage of Windows PCs was because of European Commission demands, says Microsoft, and we should get used to it.
![Blue screen with sad face emoticon and text: 'Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. 0% complete.'](https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/60450-124311-000-lede-BSOD-xl.jpg)
A typical "Blue Screen of Death" as seen by millions of people worldwide after the CrowdStrike update
The outage that closed airports, shut down hospitals, and took out television stations was actually caused because of a single Windows update. Security firm CrowdStrike pushed out a flawed update, which it admits created the problem.
However, Microsoft has now told the Wall Street Journal that the reason such an update could have a calamitous, global impact, is the fault of the European Commission. Specifically, a spokesperson said that EC agreements mean that Microsoft is not legally allowed to secure its systems the way Apple does.
Reportedly, in 2009, Microsoft agreed with the EC that it would provide equal access to Windows security developers that it has for its own teams. Therefore, CrowdStrike could push out an update without Microsoft necessarily even knowing about it.
This is Microsoft washing its hands of the issue. But it's also much more than that.
For this is Microsoft effectively saying that it allegedly cannot but certainly will not do anything to prevent this from happening again.
The Wall Street Journal notes that in 2020, Apple told security developers that they would no longer have what's called kernel access for their software. Microsoft security developers still have this type of access to Windows.
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Comments
The problem last week had nothing to do with the EU. It was sloppy coding, sloppy testing and with little to no resilience built into the whole process.
This is vintage Microsoft sloppiness going over 50 years now. Releasing substandard code, causing chaos first on the desktops, then when office networks became the norm and then the enterprise and now global.
Why we are still saddled with the worst o/s ever written I will never understand?
Windows is basically a graphic interface bolted on to DOS. Anyone who has ever followed the path from DOS to Windows 2000, Windows XP and now the latest incarnation Windows 11 knows that it has never been a stable O/S. The only reason that it is still pervasive is because Gates licensed it for a small fee to any PC maker. The hardware was never a concern for Microsoft. You could install DOS/Windows on your toaster if you like. So long as you pay the $25 fee per box. You are good to go.
Apple, ever the company to maintain quality control, would not split the two. Well, ok, there was a brief period when the Pepsi Cola moron ran Apple that the company licensed the OS to a guy in Texas I believe who agreed to a very stringent hardware contract. But that arrangement fell apart after a year. And since then Apple, after Jobs came back from Next, has grown into a $3 Trillion company, always maintaining the highest standards.
We have the equivalent of DOS/Windows in the phone space. It's called Android. You build any junky phone and slap Android on it and you are good to go.
This particular outage had to do with Windows but also with the way Windows is managed from the cloud. A single component of CrowdStrike called Falcon was not thoroughly tested and it cascaded down to every Windows install out there.
And it will happen again. Get rid of Windows and you solve half the problem.
The irony is, we actually have a much more competitive market today than we did 25 years ago. Back in 1999, there was Wintel and not much else. Apple had about a 2% marketshare of the PC market, there was no smartphone market, almost all of the RISC guys were throwing in the towel out of fear of Intel, AMD was barely hanging on, etc etc.
Today, we have three major platform companies (Apple, Google, and Microsoft), not just one. We have real competition between Intel and AMD plus multiple very strong ARM-based competitors and RISC-V on the horizon.
This is basically a golden age of competition in computing platforms and the EC is trying to wreck it.
Microsoft didn't do this at all. It was Crowdstrike that did it.
then you made the facts fit this narrative
only problem is, you didn't actually read the article
Microsoft was not involved in this issue, it was Crowdstrike alone.
which is why the solution came from Crowdstrike
Yep. The geniuses at the EU made it so cloudstrike can bypass Microsoft safeguards entirely and push their own junk directly onto Microsoft systems.
1 - Yes, Windows has historically been terribly insecure and full of bugs for 30 years. 2 - This incident was not Microsoft's fault. 3 - Both things can be true at the same time.
CrowdStrike is a third party security solution that many companies pay for, just like others use Symantec or McAfee security solutions. Microsoft has nothing to do with CrowdStrike, just like they have nothing to do with Symantec. CrowdStrike's Falcon service (which is what failed) is not something that just comes on every Windows machine or is even sold by Microsoft. It's not something Joe User can just install on their personal home computer. A company's enterprise IT team installs Falcon via Group Policy to its fleet of Windows and Mac machines, because they pay CrowdStrike a license for it. In this case, CrowdStrike pushed out an update to their own software that was faulty for Windows machines. So, at least in this case, if you are blaming Microsoft, you need to check your ignorance.